Losing the hard-fought battle to save the old Fitzsimons Army post in the mid-1990s turned out to be a boon for the state economy.

Back in 1995, when the 578-acre base was targeted for closure, Aurora planners estimated that Fitzsimons accounted for $328 million in local economic activity and 2,904 jobs.

The numbers are much bigger these days. In 2008, activities at the Fitzsimons site pumped $3.5 billion into the state's economy, generating $1.4 billion in personal income, according to a report on the campus' economic contributions. Not counting construction workers, there were more than 15,900 employees on the campus, mostly in health care delivery and education.

The Fitzsimons Life Sciences District and Anschutz Medical Campus has emerged as an economic bright spot in the area, bringing advanced health care and research facilities to the region, garnering national attention, and providing an economic engine that is expected to employ nearly 45,000 people when it is fully developed.

"At some point, you have to stop looking back at what you're losing and looking forward at the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity you have before you," Aurora Mayor Ed Tauer said. "In its later stages, (the old Fitzsimons) was really tapering off. At its peak, it was an average- or smaller-sized hospital. Today, it's two really world-class hospitals and an entire campus of research."

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At full buildout, the 1-square-mile campus is expected to employ 44,569 people. When Denver International Airport opened on its 53 square miles of ground, it had 30,000 employees, said Dick Hinson, senior vice president of the Aurora Economic Development Council.

Both projects cost about $4.5 billion.

By way of comparison, the 909-acre Denver Technological Center has about 40,000 workers in 14 million square feet of office space.

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More than 6 million square feet of corporate and research space has been developed at Fitzsimons, including the University of Colorado Hospital, Children's Hospital, the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes and the School of Dental Medicine.

By the time all is said and done, the entire district and medical campus will account for about 18 million square feet.

"It's a huge capital investment and huge employment impact in smaller space," Hinson said of Fitzsimons.

The campus is much denser than the 7,000-acre Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, which has a total of 22 million square feet of developed space and 42,000 employees.

The Fitzsimons campus is divided into three zones that promote collaboration and innovation: an education zone with facilities for training future doctors and other health care professionals; a research zone; and a clinical-care zone with the University of Colorado Hospital and Children's Hospital.

The Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center is expected to open there in the spring of 2014.

The Fitzsimons campus has put Colorado on the map in bioscience circles, a position economic development guru Tom Clark has worked toward since 1987.

"We saw a unique competitive advantage in medical instruments and saw the promise of biopharma," said Clark, executive vice president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp.

At the time of the base closures in the mid-1990s, Colorado's bioscience industry was starting to blossom. Amgen acquired Boulder-based Synergen and the Colorado Bioscience Association was formed. Other companies were being created based on research from the state's universities.

Today, there are more than 400 bioscience companies in the Denver area employing more than 16,000 people. The industry is expected to have a $6.3 billion economic impact on Colorado this year with 34,000 jobs created.

"What was a fledgling industry suddenly became a real industry," Clark said. "And in the midst of all that, Denver could not expand its health sciences center."

That's when Aurora's then-mayor, Paul Tauer, stepped in. He knew he had to figure out something to do with the Fitzsimons campus after the Base Realignment and Closure Commission shut it down.

"The Fitz campus presented us with an opportunity to do something no one else in the country ever had," Clark said. "You can walk across the street from research and go into private business."

Located across from the Anschutz Medical Campus is the Colorado Science + Technology Park, a 184-acre portion of the Fitzsimons Life Science District that has been set aside for new development.

The Science + Technology Park is designed to serve companies at every stage of growth. There's a business incubator in Bioscience Park Center that includes fully outfitted office suites and labs, as well as a host of advisory and administrative services.

Other buildings in the district can be designed to fit each company's office- and lab-space requirements, and there is plenty of developable land for companies that need their own building or campus.

"There are at least a dozen if not more companies that are in the very early stage of proof of concept and have been working in the incubator," said John Lehigh, chief operating officer of Forest City Enterprises' Denver office, which controls the land. "Some of those companies are the ones we would expect to pop out and need to expand and grow and fill other buildings we plan to build."

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